Tuesday, July 1, 2014

The 10 Maddest of the Mad Science Projects Funded by DARPA

Mark Strauss

Founded
in 1958 to prevent technological surprises such as Sputnik, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency funds projects that are both outside
the box and off the wall. Although DARPA gave us the Internet and GPS,
plenty of its blue-sky ideas have crashed back down to Earth. Here are
ten of them.

1) Mecha-Elephant

In 1966, DARPA commissioned a study
to "identify the types of surface vehicles whose physical and
performance characteristics would vastly improve the present limited
capability of transporting cargo and personnel cross-country over
various types of terrain to South Vietnam."

The
researchers concluded that top priority should be given to an R&D
program for "a narrow-trail vehicle (NTV) that is capable of
transporting personnel and cargo in mountainous terrain along narrow
winding jungle trails with steep slopes, and across small marshes and
shallow rivers and streams."

Hmmm….something
that could carry troops and cargo for extended distances over
mountainous terrain and steep slopes…Hey, didn't Hannibal move an entire
army across the Alps using elephants?

And
thus began one of DARPA's most infamous endeavors: designing a
"mechanical elephant" that could traverse difficult terrain on "servo
mechanism legs." When then-DARPA Director Eberhardt Rechtin found out
about the project, he immediately terminated it, calling it a "damn fool" idea that would destroy DARPA's credibility if Congress ever found out.

2) "Advancing" Our Paranormal Abilities

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In
the early 1970s, DARPA commissioned the Rand Corporation to assess
"scientific and technical activities where substantial disparities exist
between the respective U.S. and USSR research programs on paranormal
phenomenon." In other words, DARPA was concerned about the growing
psychic gap with the Soviet Union.

The report
was quite thorough, describing Soviet "advances" in the fields of
telepathy, precognition, telekinesis and dermo-optics (the "dermal
sensing of visual information"). The study concluded:

Over
forty years of research in the United States have failed to
significantly advance our understanding of paranormal phenomena.

Soviet research is much more oriented toward biological and physical theorizing than is U.S. research.

If
paranormal phenomena do exist, the thrust of Soviet research appears
more likely to lead to explanation, control and application than is U.S.
research.

No records exist on how much of that money was spent on evaluating the efficacy of tinfoil hats.

3) Let's Make A Synthetic Polio Virus

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In the late 1990s, concerns over biological weapons prompted DARPA to establish
the "Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures Program," in order to
"develop and demonstrate defensive technologies which afford the
greatest protection to uniformed warfighters, and the defense personnel
who support them, during U.S. military operations."

DARPA failed to inform anyone that one of its "unconventional" projects was $300,000 to fund
a trio of scientists who thought it would be a neat idea to synthesize
polio. They constructed the virus using its genome sequence, which was
available on the Internet, and obtained the genetic material from
companies that sell made-to-order DNA.

And then, in 2002, the scientists published their research—basically, a how-to guide—in the journal Science.
Eckard Wimmer, a professor of molecular genetics and the leader of the
project, defended the research, saying that he and his team had made the
virus to send a warning that terrorists might be able to make
biological weapons without obtaining a natural virus.

This
project would have been controversial at any time, but publishing it
less than a year after the September 11 terrorist attacks was truly
clueless—prompting panicky headlines such as "New Life for Polio?", "A New Terror Risk," and "Surfing for a Satan Bug."

Most of the scientific community called it an "inflammatory" stunt
without any practical application. Polio would not be an effective
terrorist bioweapon because it's not as infectious and lethal as many
other pathogens. And, in most cases, it would be easier to obtain a
natural virus than to build one from scratch. The only exceptions would
be smallpox and ebola, which would be nearly impossible to synthesize
from scratch using the same technique.

"It's
critically important to hold a national dialog among biologists, health
care experts, politicians, and the general public about the future of
biological work with biological weapons implications," said
Steven Block, a Stanford University expert on the applications of
biotechnology to biowarfare. "But publishing research like this is a
poor way indeed to open the conversation." Block later said that the
incident set back discussions about how to properly defend against
biological weapons by "at least three years," since new calls for
regulation by Congress "had a chilling effect."

4) Hydra, the Drone Mothership

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Hail
Hydra! Named for the multi-headed creature from Greek mythology,
DARPA's Hydra project—announced in 2013—aims to develop an undersea
network of platforms that could de deployed for weeks and months in
international waters. The submerged platforms would be capable of
deploying both underwater and aerial drones. In other words, Hydra is a
drone mothership.

Even
the most advanced vessel....can only be in one place at a time, making
the ability to respond increasingly dependent on being ready at the
right place at the right time. With the number of U.S. Navy vessels
continuing to shrink due to planned force reductions and fiscal
constraints, naval assets are increasingly stretched thin trying to
cover vast regions of interest around the globe. To maintain advantage
over adversaries, U.S. naval forces need a way to project key
capabilities in multiple locations at once, without the time and expense
of building new vessels to deliver those capabilities.

Bruce Berkowitz, a national security analyst and expert on undersea drones, has described
the project as being a tad too ambitious: "The hybrid
submarine/aircraft carrier idea has been around since the 1930s, when
the French put a seaplane hanger on the 3,000 ton Surcouf, and the
technology might be feasible. But a more likely solution is to integrate
[drones] operated from land and surface ships."

Another
concern is that filling international waters with undersea killer robot
launch facilities could be make other countries uneasy. "Pre-deploying
large amounts of warfighting hardware, including 'non-lethal' autonomous
weapons and possibly lethal ones as well, over broad areas of the
Western Pacific, or any other waters well outside the recognized
boundaries of U.S. territorial waters, is potentially provocative and
offensive to China and other nations," says
Mark Gubrud, at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public
and International Affairs. "How would we react if China placed similar
systems on the seabed offshore of the United States, or around various
geographic locations where it is thought that American and Chinese
forces might clash?"

5) Building an AI for War

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It
sounds a lot like Skynet. Between 1983 and 1993, DARPA spent $1 billion
on computer research to achieve machine intelligence that could support
humans in the battlefield or, in some cases, act autonomously.

Improvements
in the speed and range of weapons have increased the rate at which
battles unfold, resulting in a proliferation of computers to aid in
information flow and decision making at all levels of military
organization. . . A countervailing effect on this trend is the rapidly
decreasing predictability of military situations, which makes computers
with inflexible logic of limited value. . . Confronted with such
situations, leaders and planners will . . . be forced to rely solely on
their people to respond in unpredictable situations. Revolutionary
improvements in computing technology are required to provide more
capable machine assistance in such unanticipated combat situations. . . .
Improvements can result only if future computers can provide a new
quantum level of functional capabilities.

Translation:
Faster battles push us to rely more on computers, but current computers
cannot handle the increased uncertainty and complexity. This means that
we have to rely on people. But without computer assistance, people
can't cope with the complexity and unpredictability, either. So we need
new, more powerful computer systems that can actually think.

The
goal of SCI was nothing less than full machine intelligence. "The
machine…would run ten billion instructions per second to see, hear,
speak, and think like a human," wrote Alex Roland with Philip Shiman in their history of the project, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993. "The degree of integration required would rival that achieved by the human brain, the most complex instrument known to man."

This
artificial intelligence would supposedly enable three specific military
applications. For the Army, DARPA proposed a class of "autonomous land
vehicles," able not only to move around independently, but also to
"sense and interpret their environment, plan and reason using sensed and
other data, initiate actions to be taken, and communicate with humans
or other systems." For the Air Force, DARPA envisioned a "pilot's
associate" to aid aircraft operators who are "regularly overwhelmed by
the quantity of incoming data and communications on which they must base
life or death decisions," in tasks ranging from the routine to those
that are "difficult or impossible for the operator altogether" and
require the "ability to accept high-level goal statements or task
descriptions." Finally, the Navy would be given a "battle management
system," "capable of comprehending uncertain data to produce forecasts
of likely events."

The
expectation of creating full artificial intelligence during this era
was derided as "fantasy" by critics within the computer industry.
Another point of contention: war is unpredictable because human behavior
can be unpredictable, so how could a machine possibly be expected to
forecast and respond to events?

And,
from the very onset, there were concerns that SCI would be given
control of the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative.

Much
of the technology push of SCI fits comfortably into the ballistic
missile defense framework. The Initiative states: "An extremely
stressing example. . . is the projected defense against strategic
nuclear missiles, where systems must react so rapidly that it is likely
that almost complete reliance will have to be placed on automated
systems." The government's Fletcher Report, which analyzes the proposed
"star wars" defense system, claims: "It seems clear. . . that some
degree of automation in the decision to commit weapons is inevitable if a
ballistic missile defense system is to be at all credible." Whatever
one's assessment of "star wars," this analysis supports our general
concern with the increasing reliance on automatic decision-making in
critical weapons systems.

In
the end, though, the debate was moot. Much like the Strategic Defense
Initiative, the Strategic Computer Initiative's goals proved to be
technologically out of reach. As the Bulletin presciently warned nearly a decade before the project's cancellation:

Over
the years, the lure of artiﬁcial intelligence has led to a growing
appetite for research funding. The appetite, in turn, has led the
professional community to make promises, many of which have turned out
to be more difﬁcult to fulfill than was anticipated….These unfulﬁlled
promises are frequently a combination of ordinary naivete, unwarranted
optimism and a common if regrettable tendency to exaggerate in scientiﬁc
proposals. Shortcomings are often masked by subtle semantic shifts.
When we fail to instill "reasoning" or "understanding" in our machines,
we tend to adjust the meaning of these terms to describe what we have in
fact accomplished. In the process, we obscure the real meaning of our
claims for artiﬁcial intelligence.

6) The Hafnium Bomb

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DARPA
spent $30 million to build a hafnium bomb—a weapon that never existed
and probably never will. Its would-be creator, Carl Collins, was a
physics professor from Texas who, in 1999, claimed
that he had used a dental X-ray machine to release energy from a trace
of the isomer of hafnium-178. An isomer is a long-lived excited state of
an atom's nucleus that decays by the emission of gamma rays. In theory,
isomers might store millions of times more triggerable energy than that
contained in chemical high explosives.

Collins
claimed that he had unlocked the secret. If so, then a hafnium bomb the
size of a hand grenade could have the force of a small tactical nuclear
weapon. Better still, from the perspective of defense officials,
because the triggering was an electromagnetic phenomenon, not nuclear
fission, a hafnium bomb would not release radiation and might not be
covered by nuclear treaties.

Just
one small problem: nobody else was able to reproduce the results of
Collins' experiments, including a team of physicists from the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with scientists at the
Los Alamos and Argonne national labs. And a report published by the
Institute for Defense Analyses—a federally funded research arm of the
Pentagon—concluded that Collins' work was "flawed and should not have
passed peer review."

The story should have ended there. But, according to a 2004 investigative report by the Washington Post:

Martin
Stickley arrived at DARPA as a program manager in 2002….According to
two of the participants in Collins's dental X-ray experiment, Stickley
was a believer…..For Stickley, a promoter of isomer research, the timing
was fortunate…. the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, unveiled by Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, emphasized that the United States needed new
nuclear as well as non-nuclear bombs to destroy difficult targets, such
as buried bunkers that could hide terrorists or weapons of mass
destruction.

Stickley
gave a PowerPoint briefing to a review panel in which he promoted the
hafnium program as the next revolution in warfare. Hafnium bombs could
be loaded in artillery shells, according to a copy of the briefing
slides, or they could be used in the Pentagon's missile defense systems
to knock incoming ballistic missiles out of the air. He encapsulated his
vision of the program in a startling PowerPoint slide: a small hafnium
hand grenade with a pullout ring and a caption that read, "Miniature
bomb. Explosive yield, 2 KT [kilotons]. Size, 5-inch diameter." That
would be an explosion about one-seventh the power of the bomb that
obliterated Hiroshima in 1945.

Hafnium would have been just what the secretary had ordered, if it had worked.

It didn't.

7) Total Information Awareness

Here's some belated advice to DARPA if you're going to establish a massive data-mining program:

Don't give it a creepy, Orwellian name like "Total Information Awareness."

If
you're trying to gain the trust of Congress and the public, don't pick
John Poindexter—a key player in the Iran-Contra Scandal—to oversee the
program.

Design
a logo that doesn't look like the Eye of Sauron atop a pyramid, casting
its gaze across the entire planet. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but
even I'm convinced that it's a secret symbol for the Illuminati cabal.

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In 2002, DARPA envisioned
TIA as a massive counter-terrorism database that would use advanced
methods for data collection, processing and analysis. The ultimate goal
was to preempt terrorist attacks. Poindexter, who was the head of the
program, declared in a speech
that the TIA is "about creating technologies that would permit us to
have both security and privacy. More than just making sure that
different databases can talk to one another, we need better ways to
extract information from those unified databases, and to ensure that the
private information of innocent citizens is protected."

At
the time, the technology capable of accomplishing some of the program's
data mining goals hadn't even been invented yet. For instance, one
component of the system was a technology that enabled unilingual English
speakers to monitor information in other languages. To that end, DARPA
began awarding contracts for the design and development of TIA system
components in the summer of 2002.

An
ensuing firestorm in the press over privacy concerns prompted Congress
to kill TIA's funding in September 2003. The Department of Defense's
Inspector General concluded:
"Total Information Awareness could prove valuable in combating
terrorism, but DARPA could have better addressed the sensitivity of the
technology to minimize the possibility of any governmental abuse of
power and could have assisted in the successful transition of the
technology into the operational environment." Poindexter resigned from
the government.

And, if this program sounds curiously familiar to the National Security Agency, it's no coincidence. As far back as 2006, the National Journal
learned that the program was still alive—it had been quietly moved from
DARPA to another group, which built technologies primarily for the NSA.

And the NSA version was worse. As reporter Shane Harris wrote in 2012:

After
TIA was officially shut down in 2003, the NSA adopted many of Mr.
Poindexter's ideas except for two: an application that would "anonymize"
data, so that information could be linked to a person only through a
court order; and a set of audit logs, which would keep track of whether
innocent Americans' communications were getting caught in a digital net.

Had
the agency's leaders actually listened to everything Mr. Poindexter had
to say, they might not find themselves telling the American people:
"We're not spying on you. Trust us."

TIA may never have come to fruition, but it did lead to one successful project. The creators of the science fiction show Person of Interest
say that TIA was one of their inspirations for the idea of the
artificially intelligent Machine, created to keep the entire country
under surveillance.

8) The Flying Humvee

In
2010, DARPA unveiled a new concept for troop transport. The
Transformer— otherwise known as the Vertical Takeoff and Landing
Roadable Air Vehicle—was envisioned as a flying Humvee capable of
carrying up to four soldiers.

According to DARPA's initial solicitation announcement,
the Transformer "provides unprecedented options to avoid traditional
and asymmetrical threats while avoiding road obstructions.
Transportation is no longer restricted to trafficable terrain that tends
to makes movement predictable. The vehicle can avoid Improvised
Explosive Devices (IEDs) and ambushes, while also allowing the
warfighter to approach targets from directions that give our warfighters
the advantage in mobile ground operations."

The concept got high marks for its inherent coolness, but not so much for practicality. As Spencer Ackerman observed:

It's
difficult to imagine a military problem that the Transformer actually
solves. DARPA initially envisioned it as an answer to homemade bombs
that disable ground vehicles; just glide above the ground to avoid the
boom. But assuming that the U.S. is even involved in a land conflict
after Afghanistan to make that problem salient, why wouldn't insurgents
plant those bombs to lure the Transformer into the air and then hit it
with a rocket-propelled grenade or anti-tank missile?

After
all, the thing only has to stop small arms fire. Armoring it more
seriously will add weight, imperiling its ability to stay aloft and
stressing the fuel system. Would the Transformer come equipped with tiny
anti-missile weapons?

Outside
of that, would the Marines use the thin-skinned Transformer as a
ship-to-shore aircraft, replacing their longed-for swimming tanks as a
way of storming an enemy beach?....For that matter, in an age of tight
defense budgets, is it sensible to solve the problem of improvised
explosive devices by building a hybrid truck, helicopter and airplane?

In 2013, DARPA changed the direction of the program, so that it became
the Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System (ARES). ARES (image above) is
conceived as an unpiloted payload system with detachable modules
designed for specific missions: carrying surveillance equipment,
evacuating wounded or hauling up to 3,000 pounds of cargo. It would
primarily serve ground units in the field that don't have helicopters. A
cargo drone is not as exciting as a flying Humvee, but arguably more
practical.

9) A Hand-Held Fusion Reactor

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This
one is a bit of a mystery…a $3 million project that appeared in DARPA's
Fiscal Year 2009 budget, never to be heard about again. [Insert conspiracy theory here]

What is known is that DARPA believed it was possible to construct a fusion reactor the size of a microchip:

The
Chip-Scale High Energy Atomic Beams program will develop chip-scale
high-energy atomic beam technology by developing high-efficiency radio
frequency accelerators, either linear or circular, that can achieve
energies of protons and other ions up to a few mega electron volts.
Chip-scale integration offers precise, micro actuators and high electric
field generation at modest power levels that will enable several order
of magnitude decreases in the volume needed to accelerate the ions.
Furthermore, thermal isolation techniques will enable a high efficiency
beam to power converters, perhaps making chipscale self-sustained fusion
possible.

At least it cost less than the hafnium bomb.

10) A Futures Market in Terrorism

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Several
DARPA projects have focused on developing ways to anticipate future
events. And what better way to do that than to tap into the futures
market?

The
project, dubbed Future Markets Applied to Prediction, or FutureMAP,
intended to launch a public website that would encourage anonymous
speculators to bet on the likelihood of terrorist attacks,
assassinations and coups in the Middle East.

Two angry senators disclosed
the project in July 2003, hoping to head off the registration of
investors. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) said
more than $500,000 in taxpayer money had already been spent to develop
the project, and the Pentagon had requested an additional $8 million
over the next two years.

"Spending
taxpayer dollars to create terrorism betting parlors is as wasteful as
it is repugnant," Wyden and Dorgan said in a letter to the Pentagon.
"The American people want the federal government to use its resources
enhancing our security, not gambling on it."

Initially, the Pentagon defended the project, releasing a statement that read:

''Research
indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely
aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information. Futures markets
have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections
results; they are often better than expert opinions. DARPA has
undertaken this research as part of its effort to investigate the
broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks and will
continue to reevaluate the technical promise of the program before
committing additional funds beyond Fiscal Year 2003."

But,
the outcry was such that the Pentagon quickly distanced itself from
FutureMAP—calling it an example of imaginative "excess"—and shut it
down.

Still, FutureMAP had its defenders, including financial journalist James Surowiecki, who wrote in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds:

Killing
the project ensured only that we would have no ideas whether decision
markets might have something to add to our current intelligence
efforts…Let's admit that there's something viscerally ghoulish about
betting on an assassination attempt. But, let's also admit that U.S.
government analysts ask themselves every day the same questions that
traders would have been asking: How stable is the government of Jordan?
How likely is it the House of Saud will fall?...If it isn't immoral for
the U.S. government to ask these questions, it's hard to see how it's
immoral for people outside the U.S. government to ask them.